1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for communicating signals between electronic circuits. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for equalizing signals that are communicated across capacitively coupled links.
2. Related Art
Communicating data over long on-chip signal lines or wires (also referred to as links) at high data rates consumes a significant portion of the total energy used by modern integrated circuit chips. Existing approaches to address this challenge include using capacitively coupled transmit drivers.
There are, however, limits to the performance improvement offered by such techniques. For example, even a capacitively coupled wire has a finite bandwidth due to intrinsic resistance, capacitance, and inductance. Such a lossy communication channel between circuits degrades system performance (resulting in an increased bit-error rate and/or increased power consumption) as a length of the on-chip wire and/or the data rate is increased. As a consequence, losses in wires limit the rate at which data may be communicated between circuits for a given wire length, communication channel error margin, and/or power budget.
What is needed is a method and an apparatus that facilitates communication on capacitively coupled links without the problems listed above.